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COULD SOFTWARE EVOLVE NATURALLY?

by TOM BUNZEL During the last few weeks I have been confronted with several troubling images of caged and chained animals, some in circuses, which affected me deeply. It made me wonder whether my f…WebInvestigator.KK.org

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During the last few weeks I have been confronted with several troubling images of caged and chained animals, some in circuses, which affected me deeply.

It made me wonder whether my feelings of sadness, anger, and empathy would have been similarly aroused if I had seen a computer tethered to a desk, or a rock chained to another rock.

Of course not.

It reminded me deeply of one of the Dalai Lama’s suggestions for meditation — that within stillness one try to sense the interconnectedness of allsentient beings.

On a scientific level we usually attribute sentience to the presence of a brain and nervous system; it is interesting to consider that at the smallest molecular levels some viruses are alive sometimes, and inanimate substances at other times. (Sometimes this is a matter of whether they are in a host organism.)

In any case there is something in us that seems to know or believe we know when something is animate or inanimate — alive or not alive.

This sense seems related not to that we feel but indeed how we feel — to the aspect of sensation that biologists and psychologists sometimes refer to as “qualia” — the quality of a feeling that something within us knows.

For example, we can read many articles about wine but the actual taste of a sip of wine leaves us with an ineffable taste that we can sense but for which all additional verbal description is inadequate.

Similarly we simply know that an animal that is caged or chained is suffering because of empathy — we put ourselves in that being’s position and know that for us it would horrible and intolerable.

In his book I Am a Strange Loop, neuroscientist Douglas R. Hofstadter proposes that there is a depth of sensation and thought that is essentially bottomless (an endless loop of “knowing” or information) that results in our feeling and noticing an emotion–and thereby knowing or sensing that “something” is alive.

To be sure, we can be fooled. The Turing test for artificial intelligence is based on the premise that at some point an inanimate something can convince us it’s human through our verbal interaction with it.

So if we take this inquiry a bit further we know that such an “artificially” intelligent machine is powered by software that was presumably intentionally and intelligently programmed.

And as we’ve noted previously, our DNA operates as software — we can now edit and reprogram it to make biochemical changes in ourselves or even create other organisms.

But DNA is presumably the product of natural evolution. While we can now synthesize it (artificially) in the “natural” world it has preceded us by billions of years.

Biochemically DNA also interacts with the other substances and hormones in our bodies to apparently result in or produce our feelings like empathy, sadness, and anger — we know that in some instances these can be measured by biochemical monitoring.

But again we do not know the HOW. How do these biochemical combinations produce qualia — or the feeling or taste of anything? What is noticing or evaluating these sensations and then labeling them; or better yet what notices even before a label is applied?

Going deeper, it would seem that it is precisely the ability to sense and evaluate a sensation or feeling that makes something alive, animate, or conscious.

It is the presence of a quality (not a thing) that allows us from our “inside” to know that we’re here, that we feel, and of course that we exist.

And it is the sense that the caged or chained animal also feels its existence and knows its predicament, and in fact has been horribly deprived of necessary qualia-like affection, that gives rise to our empathy, however it may express biochemically…

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colouredjustice.wordpress.com
Curi56blog
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